KDE won't start after upgrade from feisty to gutsy RC1 an other surprises

[pfaelzerchen]

Today I tried to upgrade my installation from Feisty to the new Gutsy RC1. For Upgrading I used aptitude. The new packages seemed to install properly so I rebooted after aptitude finished upgrading.

After the reboot I tried to login to a KDE session from kdm, which left me alone with a lonely screen showing a background picture (the one from kdm not mine) doing nothing for a while. STRG+ALT+BACKSPACE helped me to get back to kdm.

After this first suprise I tried to switch to console to check if I can fix this problem I came to the next surprise: There were no longer any login prompts on the tty1-6. So I had to try the failsafe session from kdm which worked.

I then tried to run "startkde" from the failsafe console. This seemed to load my KDE session. But after showing Desktop and Kicker everything crashed and I got back to the kdm login screen. After logging in to the next failsafe session I started (in this order): kwin, kdeinit, kdesktop and kicker from the failsafe console. So now I am able to use KDE.

At the moment I don't know what is causing KDE to crash at startup. I already tried to remove the whole .kde-Folder in my home directory which had no effect. KDE did not start again.

I had a similar problem with the Beta same days ago. After trying to solve the problem by installing some packages, which triggered a recreation of the initram stuff, the whole system got unbootable so I had to restore my old feisty system backup. I'm sorry for being not able to be more precise about the packages I installed then, but as I was not able to boot the system I forgot to make notes about that.

I will keep this kind of messy system for some days as I think you may have further questions.

[pfaelzerchen (pfaelzerchen)]

I just saw that the problem with the blank tty1-6 was already mentioned in bug #129910.

Anyway, KDE not starting after an system upgrade seems a critical bug to me.

[pfaelzerchen (pfaelzerchen)]

After having loaded the KDE desktop with the help of the failsafe console (and then starting kwin, kinit, kdesktop, kicker manually), reconfiguring the KMenu, adding a new applet (Kima) to the kicker and logging out from this session I was now able to normally login to KDE as if there never was a problem with it.

For me this problem is solved now.

[jai_mantravadi (jai-mantravadi)]

Can confirm this bug (at least somewhat) after upgrading to Gutsy using RC1 CD. I thought at first it might be a drive space issue (93% full), but now that the problem is still there with only 56% full, I don't think that's the case. I am able to load a latest failsafe kernel (grub automagically added) and KDE starts just fine (although its not my regular desktop). I'll try Matthias' method and see if it works for me. Please note that this happened *after* a number of reboots, but within 1-2 days of installing Gutsy. For me this is a *big* problem and should be marked as such.

[jai_mantravadi (jai-mantravadi)]

my workaround to fix this was to "sudo mv ~/.kde ~/.kdebackup" and then restart kde. After that, you will start out with a "first time" KDE setup, and you'll have to migrate your settings over, either by copying over the .kde directory (which I did), or by hacking the files for the settings you want (probably better than what I did). Hope it helps somebody else!

[Harsh Singh (hisingh1)]

Repeat report.

[xteejx (xteejx)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. You reported this bug a while ago and there hasn't been any activity in it recently. We were wondering if this is still an issue for you. Can you try with the latest release? Thanks in advance.

[Jonathan Thomas (echidnaman)]

We are closing this bug report because it lacks the information we need to investigate the problem, as described in the previous comments. Please reopen it if you can give us the missing information, and don't hesitate to submit bug reports in the future. To reopen the bug report you can click on the current status, under the Status column, and change the Status back to "New". Thanks again!